By the calendar it’s not quite summer yet, but the northeast has already wilted under August heat — and the movies already feel spent and depleted, in need of a second wind. The Pixar movie, WALL-E, might do it: a film without dialogue seems like a mighty good idea given the screenwriting of late. But this week’s comedies — I had held out hope for Get Smart, but based on word-of-shoe-phone will likely get it on Netflix or HBO next summer — feel like filler. I’m lukewarm on Will Smith’s latest Fourth of July picture (I’m lukewarm on Will Smith, period). There are indies to be considered, but by and large, I can Rip Van Winkle the hoped-for Hollywood hits till mid-July, when The Dark Knight and, yes, Mamma Mia! open. I have a growing curiosity about Hellboy II, but it’s hard to see a cult-ish sequel getting much traction.

Still, I’m not entirely disenchanted, though you might think me so given last week’s no-show. I went to the press screening of The Incredible Hulk, like a good little critic, and banged out a few paragraphs on it, admittedly a bit late. But WordPress ate my homework, which I didn’t realize till yesterday. Now, I could push the “delete” key, and be done with yesterday’s hit, which you can already scrape mold from. But, no — I made the effort, dammit, so having raged at the machine here it is, slightly freshened as we head to this week’s haul.

The dumb-ass Hulk movie some of you have been waiting for has arrived. Hear me out: While Ang Lee’s much-mocked V.1 of 2003 makes a mountain out of a molehill, digging deep into a simple Marvel concept, it has an abundance of style, and maybe too much of everything, really. There’s a crazily Freudian father-son dynamic, Pop Art editing matched to comic book frames, and loony flights of fancy (the untamable Hulk leaping over mountains) that only a top-flight filmmaker would dare to risk. By contrast, there’s nothing particularly at stake in the new do-over, The Incredible Hulk. It’s an unleavened summer blockbuster, an entertainment machine that blows things up, sputters, grinds, and stops after two hours, then resumes to pick up new passengers at the multiplex.

Hulk left me feeling overstuffed, but I knew I had seen something that departed from the comic book adaptation template. The Incredible Hulk clings to it for dear life, too timid to do anything out of the ordinary and jeopardize the gross and the franchise possibilities. (more…)

You can see the nominees for best foreign-language film at the Oscars coming from a kilometer away. They’re tied to some sort of hot-button issue, or a pivotal historical event in the 20th century (see this year’s winner, The Counterfeiters), or a polyglot of arty and hearty elements that are delivered to us in subtitles. They are also often not the best movies their countries have to offer. Mongol, the 2007 nominee from Kazakhstan (choke on it, Borat), departs from the template. It begins with an ancient Mongolian proverb that might have sustained Conan the Barbarian through his various trials — “Do not scorn the weak cub; he may become the brutal tiger” — and with plates of 12th-century mutton and meat dishes thrust into our faces. Ladies and gentlemen, loosen the ascots you wear when you enter the arthouse for the usual highfalutin fare: There will be blood.

This is the story of Genghis Khan. Or, rather, one-third of it: the Russian director, Sergei Bodrov (of the 1996 Oscar nominee Prisoner of the Mountains, a Tolstoy update) has announced two more parts. Temudgin, the boy who would be Khan, has not been well-served by Hollywood. On Turner Classic Movies recently I came across the 1965 feature Genghis Khan, with all-purpose ethnic Omar Sharif grappling with a usurping Stephen Boyd and the none-too-Chinese James Mason and Robert Morley in yellow face and false eyelashes as onlookers to their quarrel. It was about as good as a Genghis Khan picture from the director of Where the Boys Are and Come Fly with Me could be. It was, however, still better than the legendary-for-the-wrong-reasons The Conqueror (1956), which I read about in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time in 1978 and lived down to its reputation when I saw it 20 years later. Here, red-haired Susan Hayward plays Borte, Genghis Khan’s hot-tempered lady love, and as Temudgin — a scowling John Wayne. “I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, take her,” the Duke drawls. “There are moments for wisdom and moments when I listen to my blood; my blood says, take this Tartar woman.” If the subject had been alive during the making of this picture the rebuilding of Hollywood after the wrath of Khan would still be going on. [As it was, it was the cast and crew who suffered from the irradiated soil of the Utah locations, with many, including the two leads, dying in a vicious cancer cluster over the next two decades.]

Mongol has the smell of authenticity. [Dudes, I haven’t forgotten Genghis Khan’s gnarly appearance in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but we shall pass over that in silence.] (more…)

Like Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross, I’m overjoyed to find myself on the big board, with all the cool kids who’ve written “Most Popular” Popdose posts. And I didn’t even have to do anything new; hell, I called in sick last week, and upon my return there was my weeks-old summer-movie-guide entry, #4 with a bullet. Folks, you’ve taken me this far, so I humbly ask that you take me all the way. The heck with those “worst of the ’80s” music posts: what was so bad about Starship and “Kokomo,” anyway? At the very least I should be in the running for the steak knives.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was the first movie I pre-raved about in my ever-climbing survey, so a word or two about it is in order. I saw it with my parents, which in itself packed a nostalgic charge, back to 1981 and Raiders of the Lost Ark, when you had to get to the theater early and be prepared to wait an hour to see the show. With “event pictures” opening three per summer weekend nowadays and thousands of screens showing them around the clock, we pretty much just breezed in with 15 minutes to go on Memorial Day, which meant we had to endure a fate worse than a temple of doom: Commercials. Didn’t have those back in 1981—but when I first saw them appended to movies in Hong Kong in the late ’80s, and audiences sitting sheeplike through them, my crystal skull prophesied that the practice would jump the Pacific, and so it did.

My sixth sense also told me that there was scant chance of Spielberg and Lucas getting the old-school summer-movie mojo back, 19 years after the last, wearying Last Crusade. I wanted to believe it, and my faith was partly rewarded. The new movie strikes a reasonable balance between CGI (the Dark Star where Lucas lives) and real stunts (Spielberg, keeping the faith), and it has been shot and edited by old Spielberg hands to look like a picture copyrighted in the pre-MTV, pre-Flashdance, and pre-digital effects eras, when everything had to get faster and glitzier. Too much digital hullabaloo regurgitated in three-second bursts on-screen and I start to nod off, my synapses overloaded with visual junk food.

I stayed awake and alert throughout Crystal Skull, however, even during the heavy-going expository bits, which should have been delivered on the fly and off the cuff, like so many Hitchcock “MacGuffins.” More effort, frankly, should have gone into making the plasticized crystal skull itself look a little more imposing. For this I blame Lucas, with whom I have been estranged since the near-debacle of the Star Wars prequels. Actually, I blame Lucas for everything that went wrong; surely, the Caddyshack-ish gophers that pop up in the first sequence, spoiling the action beats, were his idea. I’d blame him for the silly, bendy-twisty contortions Shia LaBeouf endures atop moving vehicles during the big Peru chase, if I hadn’t recalled them from Spielberg’s non-Lucas pictures. Oh well: Boys will be boys.

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“That’s it,” said my friend, following our Monday evening screening of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. “I’m through with Narnia.” I know the feeling; it’s the same one I get after semi-dozing through the latest Harry Potter picture, which evidence to the contrary I’m told are getting better. That I was back at Narnia at all was kind of a surprise, given my thumbs-down response to the whole idea of sitting through a C.S. Lewis sequel in my summer movies preview last month (“a movie no one over, what, age 14, needs to see,” I sniffed). But I’m a sucker for a free preview for something that, if it got good reviews, I’d be obliged to pay eleven Brooklyn dollars to see.

It turned out to be a long sit: 144 minutes. But my posterior wasn’t too chafed as the last digital effects credit slid down the screen. I found I was in the mood for this kind of swords-clanging adventure, if only for the duration. The problem with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first of a likely seven pictures promised, was that it smacked of opportunism, following in the wake of the terrific Lord of the Rings pictures, my favorite film fantasies. As a series of books, it had its own identity, and act as a sort of Christian “answer” to Tolkien’s more heathen-ish tales, which were published in roughly the same period. [The two had a complex friendship.] Filmically, however, Rings captured the flag first, after false starts and a long gestation, and the Narnia pictures feel a little stale and impoverished by comparison. They follow in massive footsteps, which all but swallowed up the shallower homegrown mythmaking of the Star Wars prequels.

But enough time has elapsed since 2003’s stupendous Return of the King to consider the new Narnia on its own terms. The Christian elements, which Lewis himself downplayed, are further soft-pedaled here, but are likely to be a persistent, if gnat-like, bother to anyone troubled by them. [The messier, unlikely-to-be continued Golden Compass may be more your pagan speed.] Andrew Adamson’s direction is more assured this time, if lacking much of the humor of his first two Shrek pictures; there’s no way to simply shrug off or throw away all this mythology without irking the fan base. [My beef with the Harry Potters is this pathological need to cram in as much of everything as possible, to the extent that two films will be made from the seventh and final book. Works by much finer authors should be so lucky to have such craven adaptors.] The story is more of a straight-ahead swashbuckler for the family crowd, and the talking animals (more gracefully CGI-ed in Compass) are part of the fabric, not the whole show. (more…)

All I know about Speed Racer I learned as a kid, when I watched episodes of the proto-anime between spoonfuls of Cocoa Puffs. There wasn’t much to it — there was a car, a monkey, a bad guy, and once I had my sugar rush I was outta there, its theme song lodged in a tiny corner of my mind. Some 40 years later I wouldn’t have imagined it as a potential new franchise for the makers of The Matrix (1999) to put on the road, but then again I was the guy who said today’s savvy, Wii-playing kids would never, ever go for Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The Speed Racer invite for the press screening said that children over seven would be welcome to attend. Given previews that promised candy-colored joyrides on green-screened Hot Wheels tracks, I thought it should be mandatory to bring one. The goofiest thing about this perplexing enterprise is that it’s only sort of for the over-sevens; the boring parts (and there are a lot of boring parts) are for the 40-year-olds lugging their over-sevens into the theater for this week’s cinematic adrenaline rush. There are two movies going on here, neither with crossover appeal.

This was not the film the Wachowski Brothers needed to rebound with after the embarrassment of the Matrix sequels (2003). They needed to go back to something smaller, more intimate, maybe with Gina Gershon again playing a lesbian (it’s just a thought), as in their debut feature, Bound (1996). V for Vendetta (2006), which they pulled the strings on, was a mess of totalitarian clichés and good intentions. So is this one, when it forgets to be a PG movie for the family, which is often enough.

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David Mamet can’t commit. His latest Broadway show, November, is an almost-farce in need of bigger laughs. Despite its definitive title, his film Heist couldn’t quite bring itself to be a fulfilling caper picture; likewise, Spartan is a sort-of spy movie. His best work of late has been in adaptation: his film of The Winslow Boy is a fine look back at the Terence Rattigan chestnut, suitably framed for the Clinton scandal years, and his reconsideration of the near-forgotten play The Voysey Inheritance Off Broadway last season commented subtly on the Enron generation. But his tenth movie since 1987’s diamond-hard House of Games, Redbelt, is another coy shell game, a movie about martial arts that doesn’t want to be a martial arts movie.

Mamet knows how to open a picture. We are introduced to Mike Terry, proprietor of a declining L.A. dojo, who teaches Brazilian jujitsu. The magnetic Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Terry, and I will digress briefly to say that if I am scanning my cable channel line-up and hit upon one of his scenes in Kinky Boots I forget where it was I might have been going and tune in. Teaching a cop how to fight with one hand tied in the first scene, Ejiofor repeats, rhythmically, reassuringly, urgently, “There is no situation from which you cannot escape.” This will be the mantra of the story. I was intrigued. The notion of Ejiofor as the leader of a beleaguered Shaolin Temple on the West Coast was a good one; what was needed was some butts to kick.

But Mamet doesn’t want to sully his hands with that kind of picture. The martial-arts strain is crossbred with the noir-ish strands of Forties pictures like Body and Soul and The Set-Up—Mike is loathe to compete in the soulless commercial arena of the sport, and the other characters are pushing him hard to do so, some indirectly, some more bluntly. The can of worms opens when the hysterical Laura Black (a high-strung Emily Mortimer) barges into the dojo as that initial training session ends and, unhinged, fires the policeman’s gun through a window. A woozy chain of events, designed to throw Mike off his principled high horse, transpires. He saves, or seems to save, hack movie star Chet Frank (Tim Allen) from a barroom beating. A film producer (old Mamet hand Joe Mantegna) takes an interest. Business opportunities suddenly open up for his wife Sondra (Alice Braga), a fabrics designer. David Paymer talks tough. Hombres lurk on the sidelines. Ricky Jay sleazes around. (more…)

Like Hillary Clinton, Helen Hunt has always bugged me. I was never crazy about Mad About You, and while I don’t think she deserves the barbs thrown at her for As Good As It Gets (she’s been lambasted as one of the least deserving Best Actress winners) I’m not exactly quick to rise to her defense, either. Again, like HRC, I can’t quite put my finger on what it is exactly that annoys me about her. I think, on film, it may be the way she listens — the camera closes in tight on her exposure-hardened face (all that TV and movie work since she played Murray’s daughter on The Mary Tyler Moore show takes its toll) and she gets all sensitive and concerned on us. Now that in itself is no grounds for petulance, but there’s something awfully mannered about that look, which she has hung on her puss for decades now. It’s a kind of body armor, a wall against getting too close. Under the guise of empathy, of wanting to care and share, I see a big “Keep Away” sign hung around her neck. She gives you this look that suggests she feels your pain, but I know if you dared try to hug her she’d slap the crap out of you.

But, just as Clinton has impressed me by hanging tough in this campaign, going to the mattresses as surely as the characters in The Godfather after Don Corleone is hit, so, too, do I feel a new respect for Hunt with Then She Found Me,which ThinkFilm opens today. This is her debut as a feature film director (she is a co-producer and co-writer as well) and her multi-year struggle to bring Elinor Lipman’s novel to the screen accounts in part for some odd ellipses in her post-Oscar career. (I saw her on Broadway in a gorgeously designed Twelfth Night and the comedy-drama Life x 3, but her thoroughly adequate performances left little trace in my memory bank.) Going to see a Hunt-hyphenate picture, with her doing all those tasks and starring as well, was about as appealing to me as a stretch in Abu Ghraib (see below). Yet Then She Found Me has a kind of toughlove charm I responded to. (more…)

I’ve been tasked with preparing a summer movie guide for Popdose. I haven’t done one of these since I was at the Daily Northwestern, cramming dozens of titles into a few column inches. Entertainment Weekly, your local paper, and — for all I know — Orbitz, Stuff on Your Cat, and anyone with a blog will be running one of those all-bases- covered-but-somehow-lacking guides in the coming weeks. But that won’t do here. The trick is to winnow, to cut the chaff to get at the wheat. And as it’s summer, or summer-ish — the season pretty much starts with the May 2 release of Iron Man, though a case could be made for beginning a weekend earlier with the Harold & Kumar sequel, the one Iraq picture audiences may actually see — there’s a lot of fluff to separate out.

Most of these pictures are machine-stamped to be disposable, to make as much money as quick as can be, then be regurgitated as DVDs by Christmas. I find of lot of them to be dispiriting. Summer is mostly about indulging your inner child, and the kid in me just dies at some of the stuff put before us. Worse, there isn’t a single picture on the slate with a giant animal wreaking havoc. (The Incredible Hulk doesn’t count.) I love that kind of movie, but I’ll have to wait to see if Santa brings one.

But scanning the calendar I can find ten to hype about. It’s all about the sizzle, and I’m putting these on the griddle. I’ll say up front that I have no special knowledge of any of these movies, no crystal ball beyond cast lists, a few preliminary trailers, and the odd gleaning or two. They may all stink, and a rose may pop up somewhere else totally unexpected. In the spirit of trying to simplify your viewing, here are two fistfuls of films you must try to squeeze in between May Day and Labor Day. Anything constructive to add, please comment; any complaints, call management. Hey, I’m one person over here, from my garret in Brooklyn, and I tried.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (May 22). “Hoo-boy,” I can hear you snarking, “this guy’s really going out on a limb. Making the tough calls.” But I need this film to work. You need this to work. There are problems: That Jim Morrison-sounding title isn’t rocking my world. And its star, missing in action (or at least a good action film) since the Clinton years, is so old he needs to be backed up by the felonious whippersnapper whose name I can neither pronounce nor spell. Still, the notion that Steven Spielberg is rolling up his sleeves and getting back to basics, scaling back the CGI and employing the same lighting and editing style he used on the first three adventures, excites me. Those, to me, are true-blue summer movies — you remember, the ones with stories, and smarts, and heart to go along with the thrill ride. (And, in this case, Soviet bad guys and a bad gal, played by the all-purpose Cate Blanchett. Yes, Soviet, not Russian — we’re back in the USSR!) What will kids reared on rock-’em, sock-’em robot crapfests make of this? Taking this sort of picture back to its roots is a truly radical notion.

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Thirty years from now, My Blueberry Nights may be considered a good film. It may even be considered a great film. Let me explain.

Some years ago, I selected for my film-watching group (19 years old and still going strong) Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), his first made-in-America production, shot in youthquake California. It was an utter disaster upon its release: unhip, out-of-touch,pretentious. Harry Medved consigned it to his infamous Fifty Worst Films of All Time book (1978), which I still have on my shelf.

Some years later, I caught up with it on laserdisc (I still have some of those on my shelf, too.) I was entranced. Yes, the sensibility was Martian, as if the great director was visiting student revolutionaries from another galaxy. But it was a genuinely sincere attempt at engagement, and Antonioni’s attempt to get inside their mindset was valiant. As was customary, it was immaculately made, with an impeccable period score. The explosive climax, where our entire consumer culture blows up as Pink Floyd plays, was an unforgettably lunatic vision—terrifying,ridiculous, and beautiful, all at once. I had prepared my group for the worst,underplaying the film’s unique qualities. I had overstated the case: The picture, which had aged into an invaluable cultural artifact, went down fine, flaws and all.

My Blueberry Nights bears some relation. The noted Hong Kong director, Wong Kar Wai, makes his English-language debut with an American-made film that glides from New York to Memphis to Reno. (Coincidentally, he and Antonioni, acclaimed visual stylists both, were bunkmates in the 2004 omnibus film Eros.) The stakes, however, are lower. Antonioni injected himself into our national muddle, and was crucified by the right and left for doing so. Wong has Fed-Exed his muse to the West. His description of the film—“Sometimes the tangible distance between two persons can be quite small but the emotional one can be miles…I wanted to explore these expanses, both figuratively and literally, and the lengths it takes to overcome them”—pretty much applies to any of his acclaimed pictures.

I’m not his biggest acolyte. Certain audiences groove on the languorous pace and slowly-burning emotions of films like 2000’s In the Mood for Love and 2004’s 2046. I’m friends with some of these folks, and they don’t understand why I’m not on board. Or, rather, why I left the boat: I enjoy earlier films, like 2004’squirky Chungking Express and 1997’s fraught gay romance Happy Together, just fine. They had a beating heart and pulse. Gradually, however, he drifted toward being an interior decorator. The human element receded into the background; the period furnishings and wallpaper communicated the stories, off altering relationships that play out in a few airless rooms. Some find this entrancing; I get restless. (more…)

Arthouse meets grindhouse in Funny Games, and the results are no fun at all. Writer-director Michael Haneke, the Austrian provocateur behind The Piano Teacher (2002) and Caché (2005), is a filmmaker of some distinction, but even his admirers split on his original 1997 production, of which this Warner Independent Pictures release is a scene-by-scene duplication. The subtitles and “foreign-ness” of the first film gave American viewers an out; there’s no such escape this time, should cinematic rubberneckers choose to attend.

The setup is simple, as it is in horror pictures of yesteryear like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As Handel plays on the CD player of their car, we are introduced to an upscale couple, Ann (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth), and their affectionate son Georgie (Devon Gearheart). The music abruptly switches to John Zorn as the title of the film slashes across the screen and we know immediately what is to come: These classical music lovers, content in their love for each other and obviously refined values, are toast. We can smell the burn approaching as their neighbors in Southampton, where they have come to vacation, act strangely at their arrival, as if something is amiss in the community.

Georgie is the first to pick up on the scent, when Peter (Mysterious Skin co-star Brady Corbet) comes calling on Ann (pictured), looking for some eggs. The introduction of Peter’s companion, Paul (Michael Pitt), raises the alarm — with their tennis togs, sallow skin, thick lips, and closely aligned personalities, these apostles of ill will look like mimes gone seriously bad. An uneasy face-off between the parties goes Code Red when the two young men hold the family hostage, bent on torture and protracted, painful murder. (more…)